A long and arduous process
Yesterday, I wrapped up a course by Andrew Mead on Youtube called "The Great Gatsby Bootcamp." As I talked about yesterday, I ran into some serious issues while going through the course, mostly due to plugins being slightly deprecated or just incompatible with other plugins. It was really frustrating at the time, but it turns out that I learned quite a bit about Gatsby and the plugins I was using while troubleshooting, so it was worth the headache. I then watched a video by Jason Lengstorf with someone who works at Contentful where he built a little site using Contentful and Gatsby. He ran into several of the same showstoppers during the course of this video, which made me feel slightly better about my struggles. It seems that Gatsby is kind of fickle when it comes to its plugins and the configuration of these plugins is somewhat difficult, even for veterans with the tools. Nonetheless, I watched this video by Jason to try and learn a little more about using Contentful with Gatsby so I could enhance the rudimentary site we built in Andrew's course, and I certainly was able to pick up a few things.
In Andrew's course, we created a blog site that held all of the blog content on Contentful. The styling left quite a bit to be desired and the content in the actual website wasn't really what I wanted. So, last night after watching Jason's course, I went to work on this site to try and make it my own. The biggest challenge for me with Gatsby is that, as far as I can tell, you can't really use a CSS framework like Bootstrap, Semantic UI or Material UI. So, I'm having to write my own CSS, which is definitely not my strong suit. I finally figured out how to create a pretty cool header, which took way longer than it should have. Then, I had to implement some flex box stuff so the website would look good in a mobile view as well. I think, overall, this will be really good for me to not have to rely on a CSS framework so I can cultivate these skills. While I have some reservations about Gatsby with the plugin issues, there are a ton of really awesome features that Gatsby and its plugins have, and using GraphQL is really sweet. At the end of the day, these skills are going to be in high demand going forward, and it will be well worth my time to become proficient with them. I still need to learn a lot more about React, as well, so at some point, I'll need to double back and go deeper. Starting on December 9th, I will be spending 2 solid weeks in an online bootcamp and will be going deep on JavaScript, so I know I'll be back down that road, as well.
After getting my site to look close to the way I want it, I decided I'm definitely going to migrate my blog over here permanently. For one thing, I don't know enough about Vue or Nuxt to be able to tweak this current blog the way I would like it to look. It looks fine, but if I ever wanted to add another page to it, I would be lost. I don't remember enough about how I set it up to be able to change the fact that it only keeps the last 20 or so posts; in my Gatsby blog, I'll have all 128 of these posts plus whatever I write going forward, so the reader will be able to view my entire journey. Finally, and the main reason I'm switching over, is that I can customize the posts in ways I don't have set up with this current site. For example, in my new blog, I could add multiple images within the posts, make the text bold, italic, or underline, change the element to a header through header6, I can add links and I could actually add code directly into the post. There's still a lot I have to learn about both of these technologies to enhance this blog further, but I'm really excited about what I'll be capable of. I won't be releasing it until I'm completely satisfied with the style and until I've migrated all of the posts, which should probably take a couple days. When it comes out, hopefully it turns out as good as I hope it will.
Until tomorrow!
